Doris Lessing's Auld Laing Syne

...His mates are suddenly whisked off in a mysterious crystal disc that Mrs...

...One is reminded of Annie Besant, who, beginning as a Fabian Socialist, went on to find her devotions in Madame Blavat-sky's theosophy...

...The surprising mutations of evolutionary development in the distant future are, in fact, one theme of Arthur Clarke's science-fiction Childhood's End and 2001: The new mutants will exhibit a higher form of intellectual evolution than we can begin to conceive today...

...Carried on a raft to shore, Watkins finds a ruined stone city deep in an island jungle, and witnesses a motiveless slaughter between an obscene pack of dog-rats (who walk upright on their hind legs...

...Lessing cannot quite bring herself to call a flying saucer, although that is certainly what she means...

...There she becomes the mistress of a writer, Mark Coldridge, whose mad wife Lynda lives in the basement (Jane Eyre upside-down...

...Lessing judges the doctors in such institutions to be, and they begin their deadly task of restoring him to memory and family, thus annihilating his link with the higher truth of the unknown...

...In this worst of all possible worlds, they contend, schizophrenia is a response to life that is more honest than accepted normality...

...The hope of the future, Mrs...

...From her beginnings in black-and-white Rhodesia, through her years of dedication and disillusion in the Communist party, and her more recent anguish about a world poised for holocaust, Mrs...

...And now, almost a decade after The Golden Notebook, she is trying to give flesh to that earlier film outline in the guise of Charles Watkins...

...The title stands not only for male-female but, more specifically, for motherfucker...

...Even when the declarations have been long-winded and doggedly solemn, as they were in her most ambitious novel, The Golden Notebook, it was impossible not to be moved by her courage in setting down her opinions and experience as fully as she felt they had to be...

...Mrs...

...As Martha moves into the self-assaulting perils of middle age, though, she begins to realize that Lynda is mad only according to modern Britain's repressive "scientific" standards...

...Lessing, it must be said that her commitment to this seductive view of the metaphysics of madness is not the modish tropism it represents in many of Laing's guru-worshipping enthusiasts...

...Lessing has never been one for brevity or self-editing, she makes coy drama of Mercury's instructions to these "brainprinted" emissaries in a scene of embarrassingly giggly playfulness...

...Lessing insists, lies in the holy few like Charles Watkins, struggling desperately to remember the celestial briefing that preceded his descent into the hell of earth today...

...Never much of a systematic thinker, and consistently lured by the remote promise of Utopian chimeras, Mrs...

...By these means the members of society with capacities above normal (those people now considered to be in the main line of evolution) were systematically destroyed...

...Already in 1962, in The Golden Notebook, she was tentatively suggesting that what the smug world of normality--with its defensive army of psychiatrists, analysts, tranquilizers, and truth serums--calls insanity is actually a higher and purer intuition about the truth of human existence...

...Lessing arrived at the moral of her quasi-fable ("inner-space fiction," she calls it) in her own way, through a deep commitment to and then increasing disenchantment with contemporary life...

...Briefing for a Descent Into Hell (Knopf, 308 pp., $6.95), is not a novel but a tract, and a surprisingly incompetent one for a writer who has made such bold use of personal and social conflicts throughout her long and productive career...

...She reads through a five-foot shelf of lore on telepathy, levitation, hypnosis, second sight, witches and mystics, and is finally shocked into recognizing: "When they stopped torturing and killing witches, they locked people with certain capacities into lunatic asylums and told them they were freaks, and forced them into conformity by varieties of torture...

...With the 1969 publication of The Four-Gated City, which brings the tediously detailed "Children of Violence" scries to an end in the 1990s, Mrs...

...Yet not altogether, for in sleepless, unstopping soliloquy he rambles on about sailing a large boat toward the Caribbean...

...In the mental hospital, this tortured heap of eloquent visions is taken in hand by the enemy, as Mrs...

...Without the 12-volumed Frazer (third edition, revised and enlarged) and the unabridged OED, several classical and Sanskrit dictionaries, and years of experience with the anagrammatic booby traps of British crossword puzzles, the reader is caught in a storm of clues and snares that render him drenched but unenlightened...

...But now she is making a case for one of the more dubious and treacherous intellectual fads of our time--the apocalyptic view of the British psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his follower David Cooper...

...During a psychoanalytic session, Anna Wulf, the resentful autobiographical narrator, angrily tells her doctor that "sometimes I meet people, and it seems to me the fact they are cracked across, they're split, means they are keeping themselves open for something...

...Since Mrs...

...Later, in one of the four notebooks she scribbles in obsessively, Anna sketches an idea for a film: "A man or a woman who has, because of some mental condition, lost a sense of time...

...Lessing seems, in early middle-age, to have forfeited her critical intelligence and become another example of that familiar English phenomenon, the dotty prophetess of a visionary beyond...

...They used every kind of degradation, moral and physical...

...But what is this truth that is invisible to the stifled minds and blind eyes of the sane...

...Now, in MF (Knopf, 242 pp., $5.95), he takes on incest, the one remaining taboo in our time of giddy liberation--perhaps the next to fall?--in a comic demolition of Levi-Strauss, structural anthropology, and a forest of mock golden boughs heavy with Oedipal myth, riddling birds and miscegenation, on a seedy Caribbean isle that is anything but a brave new world...

...A clever, beguiling, but finally tiresome exercise...

...Lessing goes on to make it plain that Charles Watkins is really an emissary of the gods who, in an interplanetary conference on Venus, decided it was time to make slothful, destructive Earth aware of its folly...

...As the methods of society for control and manipulation became more refined, it was discovered that the extremities of physical violence were less effective than drugs...

...A man whose 'sense of reality' has gone...

...In the last few years he has disposed pell-mell, in novel after novel, of colonialism, the future, James Bond thrillers, and Russia...

...Lessing enlarged these ideas into a substantial thesis that drew her much closer to Laing's position...

...Lessing must cross every t) and a savage troop of apes, each side killing the other only for the joy of carnage...

...But Mrs...

...Her black disgust and outrage against our ugly, polluted, homicidal world have drained Mrs...

...Lessing, unlike Clarke, does not regard any of this as fantasy...

...and because of it, has a deeper sense of reality than 'normal' people...

...Doris Lessing has always been seriously deficient in a sense of humor...

...Lessing has abandoned her real strength as a writer--the minutely attentive, self-absorbed, even plodding integrity of her recorded experience--for a shallow mystical irritability that pretends to a grand ontological design but is only a quirky grab-bag of the occult...

...they will embrace any outre definition of reality, however questionable by scientific convention, so long as it is anti-Establishment, antinomian and above all antirational...

...What are those "capacities above normal" she reveres but cannot describe...

...Incurably literal-minded, Mrs...

...Her protagonist, Martha Quest Hesse, leaves the sunstruck, harsh society of her native Zambesia, and its intractably colonial separation of blacks from whites, for London...

...Nowhere in The Four-Gated City or in Briefing does she fasten coherently on any specific qualities of this finely tuned vision that only the mad seem to possess...

...In all fairness to Mrs...

...Lessing of her imaginative vitality and judgment, leaving her content with simplistic parables about dog-rats, and a naive, superstitious faith in the power of positive obedience to the diurnal and eternal movements of the heavenly spheres...

...This exuberantly inventive and awesomely prolific satirist is such an acutely sensitive cultural Geiger counter that he can spot what is only on the verge of becoming trendy, and parody it before the fashion has caught on...

...This time around, however, the brilliantly witty and learned Burgess has outwitted himself...

...Ever so real these gods are, and ever so English...

...Lessing has been a passionate taker of sides, a moral advocate of fierce persuasions about racial, class and sexual discord...

...A professor at Cambridge, he is picked up by the London police one midnight on the Embankment, disheveled and babbling deliriously, the past a nameless blank in his amnesiac mind...

...In contrast, Anthony Burgess is perhaps overendowed with that subtle gift...